Windows at CES 2012

Looking back at 2011, it was a great year for Windows and for Microsoft. We began 2011 with a little over 240 million licenses sold of Windows 7. Since then, we’ve seen incredible momentum with Windows 7 throughout 2011 (300 million licenses, 350 million licenses, 400 million licenses). As of today, more than half a billion PCs around the world are running Windows 7. The rate of licenses sold continues at more than 7 copies every second! So there are a lot of PCs today running Windows 7. And now more than ever the line-up of Windows 7 PCs is simply amazing spanning across all kinds of form factors – ranging from incredibly powerful gaming PCs, to All-in-Ones, to thin-and-light ultrabooks. Together, with our OEMS and Intel – we’ve driven advances in the chips inside PCs to allow for their designs to be smaller and sleeker without sacrificing power and battery life.

The below video, showing tonight during our CES keynote in Las Vegas, highlights many of the incredible thin-and-light PCs available right now as well as a couple that were just announced today like the HP Envy 14 Spectre ultrabook and next-generation Samsung Series 9 available in a 13 and 15 inch screen! Watch the video!

Right now is the perfect time to get a new Windows PC!

Also in 2011 – we started talking about the new generation of Windows: Windows 8. Windows 8 represents a reimagination of Windows – from the experience down to the chip. With Windows 8, the idea is that you could do everything you need with one device – whether it watching movies or getting work done like email (or writing blog posts like this one!). A Windows PC will be great for everything they need.

And tonight in our CES keynote, Tami Reller – Chief Financial Officer and Chief Marketing Officer for the Windows and Windows Live Division – previewed Windows 8. On both ARM (on a prototype hardware running a NVIDIA Tegra 3 chip) and x86 (on the Samsung preview device we gave out at BUILD) , Tami demonstrated features in Windows 8 such as the Start screen, Charms, the Windows Store, and Metro-style apps – which will be available across all your Windows 8 PCs and tablets. To see Windows 8 in action for yourself from tonight’s keynote, you’ll be able to check out the CES keynote on-demand here from Microsoft News Center (Tami is introduced at the 01:32:00 mark). You can also read my personal Windows 8 preview here in this blog post from BUILD.